


A World Full of Strangers

by Cymry



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Mindwiping, POV Second Person, POV Third Person, Past Tense, Playing around with POV and Tenses, Present Tense
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-03
Updated: 2020-08-03
Packaged: 2021-03-05 23:02:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,323
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25693234
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Cymry/pseuds/Cymry
Summary: It happens again and again and again. Waking up, knowing nothing, knowing no one. Every single time, it's a world full of strangers.
Relationships: James "Bucky" Barnes/Steve Rogers
Comments: 3
Kudos: 9





	A World Full of Strangers

You open your eyes, half-shutting them against the glare of white light. What you’re lying on is metal and it’s cold under your back. Something is moving behind you, and you twist your head to see a black shape like a slice- like they’d cut in half a- like a _semicircle_. It makes a whirring noise until it clicks into place, the empty gap facing upwards like a-

“Has it worked, doctor?”

You lower your head to see what made the noise and it is a person standing there. He is thin and pale and there’s a spattering of red- of acne on one cheek. His mouth is constantly moving, he’s biting at his bottom lip.

“Is he not quieter, more docile?” says a second voice.

This other man is shorter and has a round face with lines that the first man does not and a voice that changes constants and vowels into something new. Something about that voice makes something invisible and heavy settle on your chest. It is heavier than the restraints around your arms, making breath harder to draw in. You think this is _fear_ , but you don’t know what you have to be _afraid_ of. The second man reaches over and takes your chin in hand. His hand is soft and plump. You hate the touch of it. He turns your head slightly to the left and then to the right. You keep your eyes on him because he’s wearing- he’s got glass over his eyes and you can see the ghost of a reflection in them that might be you.

“A success,” he says in that clipped voice. “At least,” he adds, mouth coming up at the corners, “he has not tried to tear my head off.”

He looks down at you, meets your gaze, brushes a strand of hair off your forehead. It is damp, you realise, soaked in sweat like the rest of you. A bead of it runs down the side of your face, into the hollow of your temple.

“ _Smile_ ,” he says, gesturing at his own face and you imitate it to the best of your ability. You make the corners of your mouth turn up, you expose your teeth too. _Smiling_ makes your face feel stiff.

“Excellent, Sergeant Barnes.”

He turns his back on you, on Sergeant Barnes. His white coat still has stiff creases in it like a- like a goddamn-

“Put him on ice.”

***

You open your eyes. The room is dim and cold and your fingers and the tip of your nose are burning. Your throat burns too like you were just screaming. There are three men with you, one standing at your feet, and one at each arm.

“I am Kazakov,” says the man at your feet. His hair is closely shaved, his eyebrows thick and drawn together. “You will be taking orders from me. If not me then Shaposhnikov or Bulygin. Understand, Soldier?”

He speaks a language made up of hard consonants and Soldier knows that this is Russian and replies in the same,

“Yes, sir.”

Shaposhnikov’s mouth is a hard line, Bulygin’s eyes never stay still. The photo they show him is of a man called Tsaritsyn who looks straight ahead into the camera, chin lifted. Soldier’s mission is to kill this man.

Tsaritsyn has many different faces and Soldier remembers them all. When he is ordering his men to kill, his face is red, his mouth wide open, spittle flying from his lips. When Tsaritsyn takes up a gun himself, taking potshots at Soldier from the landing, his face is pale and drawn instead. His eyes are narrow. When Soldier breaks down the door to his office, stepping over the jammed gun, his mouth is parted to let words flow out, sweat gathering at his temples. When Soldier had his metal hand around his throat, his face is purple against the white of his gritted teeth, his eyes red with burst capillaries. And when he is dead, his face is glassy in a way it hadn’t been when he was alive. Corpses are inert, Soldier learns. 

As he makes his way back, he looks at the dozen men he has killed in the completion of his mission. Compared to Kazakov, they are static. People are mobile, especially in the face. Soldier watches Kazakov as he debriefs him. He has as many faces as Tsaritsyn, though subtle. The lift of an eyebrow, the movement of a cigarette from one side of his mouth to the other. As Soldier sits back in the Chair, he is, at turns, pleased and worried about this new insight.

***

You open your eyes. Your breathing is rapid like your lungs are starved of air. They call you the Winter Soldier. The Winter Soldier answers to Navarro first, then Trainor, Babson, and Fisher. Patricia Miltner is Winter Soldier’s target and he kills her from two hundred meters away with a rifle. For the brief moment she’s still alive he watches her scowl at an assistant, mouth turned down. It’s a clean shot, straight through the furrowed brow and as she falls, her mouth turns slack, turning anger into something else. The assistant and the wall are painted a vivid red.

***

You open your eyes. Asset answers to Caspe. Asset rigs a hotel room to explode and doesn’t see the faces of the people he kills. Caspe’s mouth goes wide during the debriefing, showing all his teeth. He paces the floor, making noises to himself. As Asset sit down in the Chair, he remembers that it’s called _laughing_.

***

You open your eyes. Taylor gives You orders. The target is Phan Van Chi and You kills him with a knife, forcing the blade through his neck. Down on the streets, high-pitched voices are singing. The blood runs off You’s knife and onto the ground.

***

You open your eyes. Clay, Simons, Sherman. Joshua Rosenburg. The Asset follows him, noting the names and faces of the people he meets. On the street, the people have upturned mouths, crinkles in the corner of their eyes, open hands. The Asset imitates, tries speaking Hebrew with the same upward lilt.

***

You. Adler, Kener, Goffried, Schrader. Otto Tafel, Brigitte Tafel. Sabrina, Nicole, and Sara Tafel. Sara greets Soldier clinging to the bars of her crib, her face open and covered in drool.

***

You. Osbourne. No target, just an endless series of tests. The Subject meets dozen of figures, white coats, camouflage fatigues. So many names. So many faces. When The Subject starts to copy them, when the Subject starts to use names, they take him to the Chair.

***

You. You open your eyes and there’s blood on your hands and dead scientists everywhere and when the guards burst in you stab the first one through the door with a scalpel and the second one you punch in the temple with your left hand but they eventually subdue you and drag you back into the cryotube.

***

You. Pierce. Nick Fury. Nick Fury manages to escape The Asset the first time, by burning a hole through the road. The Asset has destroyed his vehicle and, injured as he is, Fury won’t get far. The Asset finishes him off with a rifle through the window of another man’s apartment. That man gives chase, but he is not a Target. Later that changes. 

The Asset destroys the car, separates the Target from his allies. The Target’s face has gritted teeth and a furrowed brow. Like Fury, he is _determined_ and at other times _shocked_ by The Asset’s speed and ferocity. The Asset throws the shield back at him, tries to stab him, smashes through concrete where his head used to be. There is no reflection of the Asset’s face in those blue eyes, just the mask. He has no expression. When the mask gets torn off there’s no change. He has no expression.

The Target stares and this is a face The Asset hasn’t seen before. Something about the wide eyes and line between his eyebrows and the open mouth hammers The Asset somewhere in the middle of his chest.

He calls him Bucky.

***

The base was in a room full of drawers under a stone building. They were called safety deposit boxes: The Asset remembered that from three days ago. A guard had been idly flipping them open and asked what they were for. Tax evasion had been the answer that The Asset hadn’t understood. A safe place to keep valuables had been the one The Asset had understood, even if he didn’t know about _jewellery_ ; _photo albums_ ; or _cold, hard cash_. All of these were empty, a room full of holes. There were machines and people and gun and maintenance, but The Asset kept thinking about the drawers instead.

He remembered opening his eyes here, Pierce telling him how he’d shape the future, bending down to look The Asset in the face. There was nothing apart from that.

Except…

The smell of snow and wind. Waking up not in a room full of strangers, but somewhere else. The Man On The Bridge had other expressions than what he’d seen today. Happy. Angry. Hurt. Somehow The Asset knew them like he knew that last expression of _heartbreak_. The Asset’s body was like this room with empty spaces where valuables used to be.

Pierce slapped him across the face. He sat with him, cajoling, praising. The Man On The Bridge must have a name too, but Pierce didn’t give it to him. People stood around him, a wall of crossed-arms, deep frowns.

“But I knew him,” pleaded Bucky. _But I knew him_ , he thought as the black halo descended.

***

You. Pierce. Captain Steven Rogers.

***

Bucky. Steve. The fall. The water. More water trickling from Steve’s mouth, the up-and-down movement of his chest. Later, the streets full of strangers with faces he can’t read. Later, the museum, his own face up on the wall, engraved in glass, painted larger than life.

James Buchanan Barnes. Bucky.

***

Bucky opened his eyes.

He didn’t have a cluster of kids staring at him today so all he saw was the neat thatch of the hut’s roof. They were good kids, and Bucky liked the playful screams and big, white grins they threw at him. But it was also nice to wake up by himself sometimes. In the distance, Bucky heard the throb of engines and that got him out of bed, rubbing the sleep grit out of his eyes. He ducked under the lintel and saw the Quinjet settling down outside the village.

His therapists, Mjalo and Awaze, suggested looking at himself in the mirror once-a-day for fifteen minutes. It would help him reclaim his identity and his body after being cut adrift so many times in the Chair. He didn’t tell them that he’d already started that, making faces at himself and watching how his face changed with every expression. The slight curl at the corner of his mouth was a shy smile. How his nose wrinkled with disgust. The crinkle in the corner of his eyes when he smiled. Sometimes he wished someone could capture the expressions for him. Didn’t need it as he went out on his bare feet to meet Steve, didn’t need the imperfect mirror of the water. He could tell by how he sped up as the Quinjet came into view.

He met Sam first. He was strolling down from the ramp, a t-shirt and a pair of shorts ready in one hand, sunglasses ready on his face.

“Hey, Barnes!” Sam called. When Sam smiled, you could see the gap between his front teeth and it made him look younger. As Bucky predicted, he smiled and thumped Bucky on the back. “You’re looking good, man.”

“Thanks, Sam.”

“And the sun is shining, which is what I need after Albania. I’m going to lay my ass out in the grass and fry for an hour.”

“It’s a nice day.” Bucky turned his face up into the sun, closing his eyes. Not an expression he could see in the mirror, but when he closed one eye it made his lashes spread out on his cheek. And sometimes Steve would run his fingers gently over Bucky’s face in a way that didn’t need words. “I just got up.”

“Sleeping okay?”

“Yeah, I just slept late.” Bucky opened his eyes to see the expression he expected, the one where Sam suspected he picked up on something not right. These days, Bucky _knows_ things about people and he knew that Sam was kind like that. “I go walking sometimes at night. The air’s cooler and the moon looks really big over the water.”

“Sounds nice. I’d go with you, but I think there’s only one person you want to go walking in the moonlight with.” 

He waggled his eyebrows and Bucky heard a step on the ramp. He didn’t turn right away. When you’re not a stranger, you didn’t have to. He could summon up a picture of Steve’s broad shoulders and his tattered uniform and new beard, care package in one hand, soft look in his eyes. Steve could do that too. He pictured Bucky in his robes against Wakanda’s bright greenery because he knew him. Whenever they got to call, he’d start with _I was thinking of you_.

Bucky turned. The bright light caught Steve’s hair and turned it all to gold. Heartbreak was nowhere near his face and Bucky got a good look as he came down the ramp and into hugging range. The carrier bag crinkled as Steve’s arms went around him. Birds called somewhere in the distance, drowned out by Steve’s contented sigh.

“Hi, Buck.”

Some things were better than seeing expressions, like putting your fingers into Steve’s long hair and leaning into a kiss. Soft mouth, familiar mouth. He pulled back, feeling the smile, knowing what it looked like without the mirror, not caring when he had Steve to look at.

“Hey, stranger.”

**Author's Note:**

> So while rewatching Winter Soldier to research a different fic (what does your home look like, Sam Wilson, where do those stairs go?) I had a thought about how whenever Bucky was frozen and mindwiped he was starting from square zero, relearning expressions and people. He'd basically wake up in a world full of strangers. So this happened and I hope you loved reading this.


End file.
